With the advent of the interne, a plethora of social networking websites have been established. By way of example, MySpace® and Facebook® are internet-based networking sites that allow users to create and participate in social networks. Such social networking sites share several common characteristics in that they allow users to create profiles, find friends to create friend groups, and share information with individuals in their friend groups.
In finding friends or creating friend groups, existing sites allow users to search various fields or categories. For example, Facebook® allows users to search through a user database to identify individuals that went to a common high school or university. Alternatively, such sites may ask what high school the user went to and provides suggested friends who also attended the same high school. In providing such a question, the site is querying or polling the user to match the user with other similar users.
While the sites may query the user to classify the user with a similar group of people, such sites do not provide a progressive poll query that, in real-time, matches the user with other users based upon all of the polls taken. In other words, existing sites maintain a database with user profiles. When a new user registers on an existing site, the site may attempt to match the user profile with existing user profiles as stored on a database. While such existing sites match a collective user profile against predefined categories, they do not progressively poll and match the user against all other users after each query item.
Thus, a continuing need exists for a poll-based networking system that includes matching logic that is operable for matching, in real-time, a user with other users based upon all of the polls taken by the user and other users.